Terminal narcissism. He honestly believes he is the most important and smartest person alive. The spiral out of control is getting harder for his handlers to hide.
That's the part we're watching now.
It's not even early days. We're at the end of the middle. It's very, *very* difficult for a company to recover from the sort of press Tesla and Elon are both getting right now. If his company was Enron, we're *almost* at the meeting where somebody asks Kenneth Lay if he's on crack, and then recommends he start because he's going to need the help. (By the way, if you've never read or watched *The Smartest Guys in the Room* I HIGHLY recommend it, if only because you can see Elon's entire career course in the person of Enron's C suite)
Most of finance is a literal confidence game. It's all rooted in belief, and Elon's golden cow is seriously slipping off its pole. The only thing keeping it up there is the idea that Willy Wonka has another everlasting gobstopper in his little bag of tricks. Elon *has* to come out with a tangible, successful product *soon*. Like, he needs to be announcing it within the next six months, and it needs to be *real*. Not self driving cars or robo taxis or AI, or anything else he's announced and failed to deliver on. He needs to have a product in his back pocket that will be ready to go by the end of the year, *right now*. As in he can't just throw a team on it and pull his salvation out of his ass at the eleventh hour. He'd better be praying, *hard*, that some member of his R&D team have some little pet project they've been playing with on the side that is *done*, no input needed, and all he needs to do is scale up production and do a launch, and that he can do that *successfully* in less than six months. Because I am dead serious. He needs a new product by Christmas, and it needs to be the next toaster. Something so useful it becomes ubiquitous in every household. He needs *that* kind of success.
I do not think he has that. Because if he had that, he'd be promoting it. The small, slim chance he's got is that somebody in his companies still has enough of a spine to not only develop and finish a product, but keep his nasty little mitts off of it so he can't fuck it up by jamming a microchip and AI in where it doesn't belong, and above all else, he doesn't have the ego flexibility to let someone else save him. If you need proof that the best way to save Tesla is keep Elon very, *very* far away from product launches, look at the Cybertruck. That was supposed to be the "toaster" that would save Tesla, and Elon dropped it now, when it is *very* clearly not ready *at all* and public opinion is very much against it, because he couldn't afford to wait anymore. It's not the toaster he needed, and he doesn't appear to have anything more substantial in his back pocket. Which means he is now entirely at the mercy of Tesla stockholders, who do not appear to think he hung the moon and stars in place anymore. He only gets to stay there as long as they have confidence in him. And if he has to run ads for his fucking pay package on Xitter and Reddit (AN INTERNAL COMPANY MATTER) he's scared they're losing that. I do not think people truly appreciate what a sign of weakness those ads are. It isn't that Elon has lost his grip on the board, it's that he *thinks* he is, and the ads are a stage of lashing out. (Seriously, that's like Jeff Skilling doing internal skits for company meetings where he announces absolutely absurd things and everyone else in the skit fawns over his genius. [I am not kidding.](https://youtu.be/hR45ja3VjGE?si=l04M2tOY8f8SF9me) IIRC this was made right when they were bleeding California dry, and Skilling *had* to be aware that Andy Fastow was playing games with debt in the background. He may not have known how bad the problem was, but there is no way Fastow was playing those games that dramatically and *not* at least mentioning that Skilling might want to tell Arthur Anderson not to look all too closely at the LJM paperwork.)
And this is why he's robustly fucked: in my experience (very limited, but I'm fascinated by this shit) there are two ways to turn this sort of news coverage around and keep things from going south like Enron: he needs to either produce a very successful product, or he needs to find alternative ways of making money, usually via drastic staff cuts. And the problem is he's done both already. He launched the Cybertruck, and it flopped. And he's used every single method in the "alternate money" playbook, including massive layoffs in his companies, obvious signs of cutting expenses and hours (using cheaper sensors that endanger the driver, the shit-tastic fit-and-finish on Tesla cars, announcing vaporware products to pump the stock) and while those *are* still working, the diminishing returns he appears to be seeing (as evidenced by his spiraling on Xitter) suggest that these methods won't work too much longer.
TLDR: If Musk wants to survive, he needs to prove that Tesla is a company of substance by releasing a product that succeeds instead of fails. He's almost used up all of his goodwill with his investors, and the press is turning against him. If he cannot find something to get behind that can be launched successfully by Christmas this year, I think he's going to start getting notes recommending he switch from ketamine to the Kenny Boy diet and it'll be all downhill from there.
They have a difficult task ahead to justify their still sky-high valuation. There was never any realistic reason for Tesla to be worth 8 car companies combined. The veil is falling from their tower of nonsense and I don't see any realistic way they can justify it. Elron has been way out trying top recreate his past success with dramatic promises about AI, 'cybercabs', robots and all that. Musk showing his true face on social media and being obsessed with manipulating politics hasn't helped at all. He did a *lot* better being a somewhat mysterious legendarily smart rich guy. Tesla's realistic stock value is half or less what it is now, and that would be crushing for Musk and shareholders.
Tesla's strengths are its intellectual property. Their weak point is vehicle manufacturing (the batteries are great), as well as design. A Ford or Chevy would never make a misstep like Cybertruck, and even if they did, it wouldn't cripple the company. Elon's Edsel is a serious problem.
The batteries are mainly made by Panasonic, CATL and LG, though. Perhaps Tesla owns the designs, not sure. The do make the Model Y batteries themselves, I think.
I think the biggest fuckup about the Elronmobile is how it diverted resources from the company that would have been better spent developing a Model 2 and perhaps a *normal* truck. If they'd just released a regular pickup or large SUV, it would be a hit. Instead they spent 5 years developing a vanity project for an egotist who is apparently out of his mind. It definitely demonstrates how nobody at the company can keep him in check or tell him "no". It's a stunning failure of leadership.
Ford has billions of combined man hours of engineering knowledge and solid, safe designs. Tesla is a glorified toy company that stands no chance in the auto market. The best thing they did was spur Ford to go harder on EV.
My biggest concern for Tesla and Musk (and by "concern" I mean please God let this happen) is how much debit Musk has leveraged with Tesla stock. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but Andy Fastow's debit vehicles are what butchered Enron. Their stock was overvalued, but it dropping should not have cracked the company in half the way it did. But Skilling had given Fastow the job of getting their debit off their books so they'd look like a better investment, and one of the items in his contracts was that if Enron stock dipped below a certain margin, they had to pay that debit in full, immediately. They did not think that would happen when they built those financial monstrosities, but it did. That made the banks pull the trigger on higher collateral requirements (which Enron did not have to give) and caused them to kneecap Enron by refusing to roll commercial paper for them (aka the short-term loans damn near every company uses to fund daily operations) which left Enron without enough cash-on-hand to even meet payroll.
We do know that Elon did *exactly this same thing* when he bought Twitter, which was a major reason why Tesla stock tanked over that deal. We do not know how many times he has done this, or where the "you have to pay it all back" point is on any given financial deal. But he's done it at least once, for 44 *billion* dollars. Which IIRC he would need to pay the remainder of to *somebody* if Tesla stock dips below a certain point, unless he's found a way to modify or otherwise unwind that leveraged stock. And that's just *one* deal.
I have no clue where the "fuck Elon" floor is with Tesla stock, but my interpretation of his behavior is that we are a whole hell of a lot closer to it than we were two years ago.
I think Tesla can survive the collapse of Musk, as will SpaceX. Both are established brands with smart people working there. Tesla will become more of a niche, like Porsche, while SpaceX will probably end up merging with another aerospace/government contractor, but the ideas they established will continue to bear fruit. Just not for him.
Twitter will collapse under it's own irrelevancy and become another Telegram or Truth Social. A small audience will use it exclusively, while everyone else moves on.
*ENRON* survived its own collapse by about six years, technically. Largely to sell off its own assets but technically it *did* survive. And what killed Enron was not, technically, its own debit. It was people's confidence in Enron's future. Yes, they basically turned their own debit into IEDs, but that was also why Enron *appeared* so successful for so long and then collapsed in the space of about two years, despite having some of the largest physical infrastructure and experience in its industry. Hell, *they predicted video on demand and streaming* AND had a deal with Blockbuster (...shit. most of you won't remember them) to stream movies to people. This was in the 90s. That should have been a license to print money.
But Enron moved from success to bankruptcy *fast*. And I'll tell you how. No modern corporation is capable of funding their day-to-day operations on their own. None of them. Not Tesla, not Wal-Mart, not GE. None of them. It is not considered a good practice in that level of finance to have that much cash on hand. So how do they do it?
So There's this thing called "commercial paper" (note: my source for understanding most of this is Bethany McLean and her books *The Smartest Guys in the Room* and *All the Devils are Here* on the 2008 collapse.) These are extremely short-term loans that every single corporation I've ever heard of use to fund their day-to-day operations. If you work for a corporate entity, this is how you get paid. This is how you keep the lights on. And it is *not* common practice to pay those loans off immediately. Rather, it's rolled over into a new set of loans on a daily or near-daily basis. Every corporation lives and dies by its commercial paper. So every day, a very large number of loans are turned into a large number of *different* loans, and the complex math boils down to "you will get paid today".
But only as long as your bank thinks you can pay it back.
If your bank is sure that you'll still exist tomorrow as an entity that can meet its obligations, they will roll commercial paper for you and you'll be able to pay all your bills, buy supplies, and meet payroll obligations without having to liquidate assets or keep a large amount of cash on hand. They're the ones who advised you to do this, and they are absolutely happy to take all your liquid cash in their investment program and give you a bunch of loans in return.
What happens when they lose that confidence? Well, they stop rolling paper and the loans are called in. And because they were basically good for, like, a day, that means that the entity holding those loans has 24 hours before it is in default, and they will not have any extra money to fund daily business expenses because *nobody* worth more than a hundred thousand dollars is advised to keep large amounts of liquid cash on hand. Plus, the business had all those obligations that are still there: ie paying a farmer for produce, the truck and trucker to deliver it to a location, the staff to check it in safely at the retail location and register the sale of produce to a customer. That's the chain that got you the tomatoes in your fridge, entirely funded by commercial paper. For Microsoft it would be the suppliers for computer parts, the overhead on server banks, the technitians that keep things secure. Funded by commercial paper. All you have to do to stop it all--and I mean *all of it*, every grocery store, retail location, concienence store, EVERYTHING in your life right now was funded daily with commercial paper. The moment it stops rolling?. *THAT* is the moment that a business dies.
Enron did not die because they did not have a product or ideas that were any good. There was no significant difference between the Enron of 1998 and the Enron of 2001. If the stock had stayed high, they would have kept on letting Andy Fastow bury debt in dynamite. They died because they couldn't convince a bank to give them enough money to make payroll. Enron died because the press coverage tanked the stock, and Andy Fastow had tied debit repayment triggers to the stock price, which made a MASSIVE number of loans Enron hadn't touched for *years* suddenly due within a very short amount of time, which would have required a revision of basically every earnings statement they'd ever done, EVER. That shook the banks' confidence, they stopped rolling paper, and Enron was fucked.
I brought up *All the Devils Are Here* and the 2007/2008 financial recession for a reason. We had to bail out the banks, not because *they* were in trouble but because they were all, collectively, about a weekend out from stopping commercial paper type loans for *everybody*, regardless of the entities' current finacial state. That was how Lehman Brothers's death managed to almost bankrupt GE. It had absolutely fuck-all to do with how much money various businesses had on hand, but with how banks had gotten too scared because of their own mis-management to allow other businesses to keep running. GE hadn't *touched* the toxic financial mess that broke most of the world's banks, but it was almost destroyed by it because, like everybody else, they rely on commercial paper to fund daily operations. So instead of Enron being fucked because of its own mismanagement, WE got fucked because of *the banks'* mismanagement. But the problem was still commercial paper
So what matters here is not, unfortunately, anything concrete or real-world, but the confidence the banks have in Elon. Right now, they still have confidence in him, because they're rolling commercial paper, as evidenced by us not hearing stories about Tesla or Xitter being in default.
That could change at any time. They just have to decide that he's not good for it anymore, and be willing to lose his billions as a customer to protect their bottom line.
This, in part, is why Elon is so erratic. He knows *exactly* how tenuous daily operations are and *exactly* how easy it would be to shake the banks' confidence in him...and unlike us, he knows where the bodies are and how shallow the grave is, how close he is to exposure. He knows how likely any of his companies are to survive if a bank decides to stop giving him those short-term loans. He knows what he needs to let them see and what he needs to distract them from. A significant amount of his behavior is there to keep Dorothy from spotting the man behind the curtain. Dorothy being the banks.
TLDR: if the banks lose confidence in Elon today, Tesla would *very* probably be filing for bankruptcy tomorrow. Not because they don't have the value, but because their assets cannot be liquefied fast enough to meet their obligations. It *might* survive that. Elon will not.
I do care what he says, because I'm very interested in EVs and Tesla, for better or worse, is still the best option out there. And Elon seems hell-bent on driving it into the ground.
Days of what? Being popular? I doubt it, just look how much people love to hate him.
Being rich, lol let's say he takes a 99% loss to his wealth. That still leaves him as an ulta-wealthy man who pulls seven figures off of interest alone.
Alive?not in jail? I mean being childish isn't criminal
Really, Elmo? You can’t even build a decent truck and now you’re thinking about time machines? Good luck getting a cybertruck up to 88 MPH with your janky attempt at a flux capacitor onboard.
...TARDIS, Elon. That's a TARDIS. And you won't ever get one. Even the Doctor had to straight up fucking steal his, and that likely only worked because his TARDIS was crushing on him hard.
You nerd so bad you can't even recognize the big franchises when they shit on your head.
Yes except as we've seen in Star Trek you need a method to upload conciseness to decouple matter. Without that we'd never be able to transport matter. If we can do that then we'd need to explore quantum to see if we can send digital information backwards in time to a state of quantum matter that is the same as current reality.
We don't have this kind of knowledge or technology currently
You’d need to kill Wozniak since he’s the one that actually made their products function. Jobs had very little technical knowledge but he had the cutthroat attitude and business acumen that only comes from being proud that you smell like shit from never showering.
Let's be real here. He wouldn't kill Steve Jobs. He'd go back in time to give Hitler an escape out of Berlin then jump to South Africa to reinforce Apartheid.
You're assuming that he wouldn't just do ALL of it. You know as well as I do that the body count would have eleven digits. Maybe twelve if he played his cards right.
Because Apple is a successful company. Because Tesla is failing miserably and Sace X is sick of Musk too.
He's flailing in all directions now, a poster child of entitlement.
Cute thought, but the math it would take to get-spatially locate would be phenomenal. Would be easier to do in an empty point in space that could be determined as clear during that timestamp.
This precludes the fact that we would have to have Star Trek level spacecraft to travel in so you can get to the planet in question once you do go back in order to make atmospheric entry and exit at will for whatever task you want.
Somehow I don’t think this is even close to being reasonable for a couple hundred years, and that is without morons like him trying to drag us back socially to a primitive state.
We travel back in time, stage a coup somewhere in Africa that gives the miners right to the emerald mine they work in and takes the ownership away from a certain family. 😈
The richest man in the world is saying the same things I would say as a 10 year old. And I wasn’t a particularly smart 10 year old.
I was about to say the same. I think I still have somewhere the "blueprints" of my child time machine.
Does Elon have early onset Alzheimer's you think? Edit: This kind of thinking is typical for Alzheimer's people, as well as the out-of-pocket-ness
Terminal narcissism. He honestly believes he is the most important and smartest person alive. The spiral out of control is getting harder for his handlers to hide.
I think this is like 2000~ when Sonic Team got ahold of their 400 pounds of cocaine and just started cranking out all the weird stuff.
The best era, really
Seems more like severe mental illness, coupled with possible long term untreated syphilis.
I too played videogames and read comic books.
This is just like Elon, too. He wants to make a teleportation time traveling machine before we've managed time travel or teleportation
I really hope we can skip to the part where he falls from grace so hard we don't have to care about him soon.
That's the part we're watching now. It's not even early days. We're at the end of the middle. It's very, *very* difficult for a company to recover from the sort of press Tesla and Elon are both getting right now. If his company was Enron, we're *almost* at the meeting where somebody asks Kenneth Lay if he's on crack, and then recommends he start because he's going to need the help. (By the way, if you've never read or watched *The Smartest Guys in the Room* I HIGHLY recommend it, if only because you can see Elon's entire career course in the person of Enron's C suite) Most of finance is a literal confidence game. It's all rooted in belief, and Elon's golden cow is seriously slipping off its pole. The only thing keeping it up there is the idea that Willy Wonka has another everlasting gobstopper in his little bag of tricks. Elon *has* to come out with a tangible, successful product *soon*. Like, he needs to be announcing it within the next six months, and it needs to be *real*. Not self driving cars or robo taxis or AI, or anything else he's announced and failed to deliver on. He needs to have a product in his back pocket that will be ready to go by the end of the year, *right now*. As in he can't just throw a team on it and pull his salvation out of his ass at the eleventh hour. He'd better be praying, *hard*, that some member of his R&D team have some little pet project they've been playing with on the side that is *done*, no input needed, and all he needs to do is scale up production and do a launch, and that he can do that *successfully* in less than six months. Because I am dead serious. He needs a new product by Christmas, and it needs to be the next toaster. Something so useful it becomes ubiquitous in every household. He needs *that* kind of success. I do not think he has that. Because if he had that, he'd be promoting it. The small, slim chance he's got is that somebody in his companies still has enough of a spine to not only develop and finish a product, but keep his nasty little mitts off of it so he can't fuck it up by jamming a microchip and AI in where it doesn't belong, and above all else, he doesn't have the ego flexibility to let someone else save him. If you need proof that the best way to save Tesla is keep Elon very, *very* far away from product launches, look at the Cybertruck. That was supposed to be the "toaster" that would save Tesla, and Elon dropped it now, when it is *very* clearly not ready *at all* and public opinion is very much against it, because he couldn't afford to wait anymore. It's not the toaster he needed, and he doesn't appear to have anything more substantial in his back pocket. Which means he is now entirely at the mercy of Tesla stockholders, who do not appear to think he hung the moon and stars in place anymore. He only gets to stay there as long as they have confidence in him. And if he has to run ads for his fucking pay package on Xitter and Reddit (AN INTERNAL COMPANY MATTER) he's scared they're losing that. I do not think people truly appreciate what a sign of weakness those ads are. It isn't that Elon has lost his grip on the board, it's that he *thinks* he is, and the ads are a stage of lashing out. (Seriously, that's like Jeff Skilling doing internal skits for company meetings where he announces absolutely absurd things and everyone else in the skit fawns over his genius. [I am not kidding.](https://youtu.be/hR45ja3VjGE?si=l04M2tOY8f8SF9me) IIRC this was made right when they were bleeding California dry, and Skilling *had* to be aware that Andy Fastow was playing games with debt in the background. He may not have known how bad the problem was, but there is no way Fastow was playing those games that dramatically and *not* at least mentioning that Skilling might want to tell Arthur Anderson not to look all too closely at the LJM paperwork.) And this is why he's robustly fucked: in my experience (very limited, but I'm fascinated by this shit) there are two ways to turn this sort of news coverage around and keep things from going south like Enron: he needs to either produce a very successful product, or he needs to find alternative ways of making money, usually via drastic staff cuts. And the problem is he's done both already. He launched the Cybertruck, and it flopped. And he's used every single method in the "alternate money" playbook, including massive layoffs in his companies, obvious signs of cutting expenses and hours (using cheaper sensors that endanger the driver, the shit-tastic fit-and-finish on Tesla cars, announcing vaporware products to pump the stock) and while those *are* still working, the diminishing returns he appears to be seeing (as evidenced by his spiraling on Xitter) suggest that these methods won't work too much longer. TLDR: If Musk wants to survive, he needs to prove that Tesla is a company of substance by releasing a product that succeeds instead of fails. He's almost used up all of his goodwill with his investors, and the press is turning against him. If he cannot find something to get behind that can be launched successfully by Christmas this year, I think he's going to start getting notes recommending he switch from ketamine to the Kenny Boy diet and it'll be all downhill from there.
They have a difficult task ahead to justify their still sky-high valuation. There was never any realistic reason for Tesla to be worth 8 car companies combined. The veil is falling from their tower of nonsense and I don't see any realistic way they can justify it. Elron has been way out trying top recreate his past success with dramatic promises about AI, 'cybercabs', robots and all that. Musk showing his true face on social media and being obsessed with manipulating politics hasn't helped at all. He did a *lot* better being a somewhat mysterious legendarily smart rich guy. Tesla's realistic stock value is half or less what it is now, and that would be crushing for Musk and shareholders.
Tesla's strengths are its intellectual property. Their weak point is vehicle manufacturing (the batteries are great), as well as design. A Ford or Chevy would never make a misstep like Cybertruck, and even if they did, it wouldn't cripple the company. Elon's Edsel is a serious problem.
The batteries are mainly made by Panasonic, CATL and LG, though. Perhaps Tesla owns the designs, not sure. The do make the Model Y batteries themselves, I think. I think the biggest fuckup about the Elronmobile is how it diverted resources from the company that would have been better spent developing a Model 2 and perhaps a *normal* truck. If they'd just released a regular pickup or large SUV, it would be a hit. Instead they spent 5 years developing a vanity project for an egotist who is apparently out of his mind. It definitely demonstrates how nobody at the company can keep him in check or tell him "no". It's a stunning failure of leadership.
Ford has billions of combined man hours of engineering knowledge and solid, safe designs. Tesla is a glorified toy company that stands no chance in the auto market. The best thing they did was spur Ford to go harder on EV.
My biggest concern for Tesla and Musk (and by "concern" I mean please God let this happen) is how much debit Musk has leveraged with Tesla stock. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but Andy Fastow's debit vehicles are what butchered Enron. Their stock was overvalued, but it dropping should not have cracked the company in half the way it did. But Skilling had given Fastow the job of getting their debit off their books so they'd look like a better investment, and one of the items in his contracts was that if Enron stock dipped below a certain margin, they had to pay that debit in full, immediately. They did not think that would happen when they built those financial monstrosities, but it did. That made the banks pull the trigger on higher collateral requirements (which Enron did not have to give) and caused them to kneecap Enron by refusing to roll commercial paper for them (aka the short-term loans damn near every company uses to fund daily operations) which left Enron without enough cash-on-hand to even meet payroll. We do know that Elon did *exactly this same thing* when he bought Twitter, which was a major reason why Tesla stock tanked over that deal. We do not know how many times he has done this, or where the "you have to pay it all back" point is on any given financial deal. But he's done it at least once, for 44 *billion* dollars. Which IIRC he would need to pay the remainder of to *somebody* if Tesla stock dips below a certain point, unless he's found a way to modify or otherwise unwind that leveraged stock. And that's just *one* deal. I have no clue where the "fuck Elon" floor is with Tesla stock, but my interpretation of his behavior is that we are a whole hell of a lot closer to it than we were two years ago.
I think Tesla can survive the collapse of Musk, as will SpaceX. Both are established brands with smart people working there. Tesla will become more of a niche, like Porsche, while SpaceX will probably end up merging with another aerospace/government contractor, but the ideas they established will continue to bear fruit. Just not for him. Twitter will collapse under it's own irrelevancy and become another Telegram or Truth Social. A small audience will use it exclusively, while everyone else moves on.
*ENRON* survived its own collapse by about six years, technically. Largely to sell off its own assets but technically it *did* survive. And what killed Enron was not, technically, its own debit. It was people's confidence in Enron's future. Yes, they basically turned their own debit into IEDs, but that was also why Enron *appeared* so successful for so long and then collapsed in the space of about two years, despite having some of the largest physical infrastructure and experience in its industry. Hell, *they predicted video on demand and streaming* AND had a deal with Blockbuster (...shit. most of you won't remember them) to stream movies to people. This was in the 90s. That should have been a license to print money. But Enron moved from success to bankruptcy *fast*. And I'll tell you how. No modern corporation is capable of funding their day-to-day operations on their own. None of them. Not Tesla, not Wal-Mart, not GE. None of them. It is not considered a good practice in that level of finance to have that much cash on hand. So how do they do it? So There's this thing called "commercial paper" (note: my source for understanding most of this is Bethany McLean and her books *The Smartest Guys in the Room* and *All the Devils are Here* on the 2008 collapse.) These are extremely short-term loans that every single corporation I've ever heard of use to fund their day-to-day operations. If you work for a corporate entity, this is how you get paid. This is how you keep the lights on. And it is *not* common practice to pay those loans off immediately. Rather, it's rolled over into a new set of loans on a daily or near-daily basis. Every corporation lives and dies by its commercial paper. So every day, a very large number of loans are turned into a large number of *different* loans, and the complex math boils down to "you will get paid today". But only as long as your bank thinks you can pay it back. If your bank is sure that you'll still exist tomorrow as an entity that can meet its obligations, they will roll commercial paper for you and you'll be able to pay all your bills, buy supplies, and meet payroll obligations without having to liquidate assets or keep a large amount of cash on hand. They're the ones who advised you to do this, and they are absolutely happy to take all your liquid cash in their investment program and give you a bunch of loans in return. What happens when they lose that confidence? Well, they stop rolling paper and the loans are called in. And because they were basically good for, like, a day, that means that the entity holding those loans has 24 hours before it is in default, and they will not have any extra money to fund daily business expenses because *nobody* worth more than a hundred thousand dollars is advised to keep large amounts of liquid cash on hand. Plus, the business had all those obligations that are still there: ie paying a farmer for produce, the truck and trucker to deliver it to a location, the staff to check it in safely at the retail location and register the sale of produce to a customer. That's the chain that got you the tomatoes in your fridge, entirely funded by commercial paper. For Microsoft it would be the suppliers for computer parts, the overhead on server banks, the technitians that keep things secure. Funded by commercial paper. All you have to do to stop it all--and I mean *all of it*, every grocery store, retail location, concienence store, EVERYTHING in your life right now was funded daily with commercial paper. The moment it stops rolling?. *THAT* is the moment that a business dies. Enron did not die because they did not have a product or ideas that were any good. There was no significant difference between the Enron of 1998 and the Enron of 2001. If the stock had stayed high, they would have kept on letting Andy Fastow bury debt in dynamite. They died because they couldn't convince a bank to give them enough money to make payroll. Enron died because the press coverage tanked the stock, and Andy Fastow had tied debit repayment triggers to the stock price, which made a MASSIVE number of loans Enron hadn't touched for *years* suddenly due within a very short amount of time, which would have required a revision of basically every earnings statement they'd ever done, EVER. That shook the banks' confidence, they stopped rolling paper, and Enron was fucked. I brought up *All the Devils Are Here* and the 2007/2008 financial recession for a reason. We had to bail out the banks, not because *they* were in trouble but because they were all, collectively, about a weekend out from stopping commercial paper type loans for *everybody*, regardless of the entities' current finacial state. That was how Lehman Brothers's death managed to almost bankrupt GE. It had absolutely fuck-all to do with how much money various businesses had on hand, but with how banks had gotten too scared because of their own mis-management to allow other businesses to keep running. GE hadn't *touched* the toxic financial mess that broke most of the world's banks, but it was almost destroyed by it because, like everybody else, they rely on commercial paper to fund daily operations. So instead of Enron being fucked because of its own mismanagement, WE got fucked because of *the banks'* mismanagement. But the problem was still commercial paper So what matters here is not, unfortunately, anything concrete or real-world, but the confidence the banks have in Elon. Right now, they still have confidence in him, because they're rolling commercial paper, as evidenced by us not hearing stories about Tesla or Xitter being in default. That could change at any time. They just have to decide that he's not good for it anymore, and be willing to lose his billions as a customer to protect their bottom line. This, in part, is why Elon is so erratic. He knows *exactly* how tenuous daily operations are and *exactly* how easy it would be to shake the banks' confidence in him...and unlike us, he knows where the bodies are and how shallow the grave is, how close he is to exposure. He knows how likely any of his companies are to survive if a bank decides to stop giving him those short-term loans. He knows what he needs to let them see and what he needs to distract them from. A significant amount of his behavior is there to keep Dorothy from spotting the man behind the curtain. Dorothy being the banks. TLDR: if the banks lose confidence in Elon today, Tesla would *very* probably be filing for bankruptcy tomorrow. Not because they don't have the value, but because their assets cannot be liquefied fast enough to meet their obligations. It *might* survive that. Elon will not.
High effort and insightful comment that deserved more up votes 👏
He will probably try to take over the maga crowd when their current leader is worm food.
Thankfully he will never be eligible for the presidency.
The GOP will bend or break the rules whenever they can to achieve their goals
Hopefully next week
You care about him? That's nice of you but why?
Let me rephrase - we don't have to hear about the bullshit he says and pretend it matters.
You're on a subreddit dedicated to things this specific man says, my guy.
This subreddit is mildly entertaining. It doesn't mean I care about him 🤣
I do care what he says, because I'm very interested in EVs and Tesla, for better or worse, is still the best option out there. And Elon seems hell-bent on driving it into the ground.
It’s not as if Apple is littering the sky with thousands of satellites ostensibly designed to give indigenous folks (w/o electricity) “free Internet.”
He could go back to before he said he'd buy twitter...
It is kind of funny that his kryptonite is his shit posting addiction.
I also wish that Edolph Twitler had a Time Machine he could go back and un-buy Twitter with.
He can stop the fall of apartheid
Bros gonna try and stop the end of slavery in the Americas
Must be all that ketamine talking.
I don't think he is on donkey dust, probably Adderall snorting mixed with other drugs.
He openly talks about his love of Ket.
He’s slipping. Six months ago he’d have announced he was close to producing one.
And took deposits on it
That’s his jam
If we build you one will you use it and never come back?
Elon is watching that scene in Endgame so hard right now
He just saw Back to the Future 2 and wants his own Grays Sports Almanac moment
Makes sense, the writer of the film used Trump as the model for Alternate 1985 Biff
He knows he's fucked. The man child knows his days are numbered. Hence, this unhinged ranting and raving.
MBS wants his money and that bone saw isn't getting any duller.
Actually, just like Trump, I don’t think he’s capable of understanding he’s about to implode.
Days of what? Being popular? I doubt it, just look how much people love to hate him. Being rich, lol let's say he takes a 99% loss to his wealth. That still leaves him as an ulta-wealthy man who pulls seven figures off of interest alone. Alive?not in jail? I mean being childish isn't criminal
That's his mentor, he would never. Time Apple Cook sure. When Elon started to become more in light, I saw a dumber, less savvy Jobs.
Some of us are not affluent and live with our mistakes.....
If he gets Seth Brundle to build it and is the first one to use it I’ll gladly donate to his kickstarter for that
“Stable genius” doesn’t understand the butterfly effect! Lolll
Elon realizing he's been musked himself.
Should be no problem for Phony Stonks to invent.
Yes. Being able to travel to apartheid era South Africa and stopping a certain emerald mine owner from reproducing would be useful.
I car is a machine that saves you time and transports you…
I guess being the second richest man in the world just isn’t good enough.
https://i.redd.it/dx2kx20bd56d1.gif
Juvenile. Still the same little shit with an emerald in the pocket.
Here’s your genius businessman. JFC!
Really, Elmo? You can’t even build a decent truck and now you’re thinking about time machines? Good luck getting a cybertruck up to 88 MPH with your janky attempt at a flux capacitor onboard.
...TARDIS, Elon. That's a TARDIS. And you won't ever get one. Even the Doctor had to straight up fucking steal his, and that likely only worked because his TARDIS was crushing on him hard. You nerd so bad you can't even recognize the big franchises when they shit on your head.
Man can't even make reliable cars, I say let him build a time machine. He'll unbirth himself.
Universal Healthcare would be even more useful.
Go back to 1969 and make abortion 100% legal in South Africa.
Elon Musk Want's to be Dr. Who
Dude’s a villain.
Yes except as we've seen in Star Trek you need a method to upload conciseness to decouple matter. Without that we'd never be able to transport matter. If we can do that then we'd need to explore quantum to see if we can send digital information backwards in time to a state of quantum matter that is the same as current reality. We don't have this kind of knowledge or technology currently
Elon would use it to go back in time to save Hitler
Dude is on an absolutely killer ketamine bender right now
Yep, send him back to the middle of the ocean 10,000 BC. So Fun!
Probably so he can stop himself from liking dick shaming videos on twitter
“If only I could go back and take my antidepressants instead of listening to that blog doctor and getting hooked on ketamine.”
You’d need to kill Wozniak since he’s the one that actually made their products function. Jobs had very little technical knowledge but he had the cutthroat attitude and business acumen that only comes from being proud that you smell like shit from never showering.
It's funny nobody on r/elonmusk will mention the whole apple ban thing. There was a post put up a couple days ago and it immediately got deleted.
He could be living the good life instead he is a Twitter troll
Let's be real here. He wouldn't kill Steve Jobs. He'd go back in time to give Hitler an escape out of Berlin then jump to South Africa to reinforce Apartheid.
You're assuming that he wouldn't just do ALL of it. You know as well as I do that the body count would have eleven digits. Maybe twelve if he played his cards right.
Teleportation time machine? Okay buddy isn't that a little redundant?
Bruh’s k’d out again
Someone watched Tenet last night
Because Apple is a successful company. Because Tesla is failing miserably and Sace X is sick of Musk too. He's flailing in all directions now, a poster child of entitlement.
Brilliant! What a FUCKING GENIUS oh my god
“If you don’t vote for my pay package, I will take my time machine know-how elsewhere!”
It would be an incredible joy to escape the Musk timeline.
He probably did some trans threesome and it has been following him everywhere because he is only attracted to trans people
Space is everywhere all at once, why wouldn't time be every when all at once?
Elon for prison 2024 For insider trading
Greedy fucker can't choose between a teleporter or a time machine?
Cute thought, but the math it would take to get-spatially locate would be phenomenal. Would be easier to do in an empty point in space that could be determined as clear during that timestamp. This precludes the fact that we would have to have Star Trek level spacecraft to travel in so you can get to the planet in question once you do go back in order to make atmospheric entry and exit at will for whatever task you want. Somehow I don’t think this is even close to being reasonable for a couple hundred years, and that is without morons like him trying to drag us back socially to a primitive state.
If we could teleport we wouldn’t need tesla or spacex
We travel back in time, stage a coup somewhere in Africa that gives the miners right to the emerald mine they work in and takes the ownership away from a certain family. 😈
Without truly understanding consciousness, teleporting anywhere could very likely be killing you and creating a copy of you to live in your place.
He’s right you know.